How to replace one or more consecutive spaces with one single character?

Question

I want to generate the string like SEO friendly URL. I want that multiple blank space to be eliminated, the single space to be replaced by a hyphen (-), then strtolower and no special chars should be allowed.

For that I am currently the code like this:

$string = htmlspecialchars("This    Is The String");
$string = strtolower(str_replace(htmlspecialchars((' ', '-', $string)));

The above code will generate multiple hyphens. I want to eliminate that multiple space and replace it with only one space. In short, I am trying to achieve the SEO friendly URL like string. How do I do it?

Related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/741553/how-can-i-convert-two-or-more-dashes-to-singles-and-remove-all-dashes-at-the-begi, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4051889/regular-expression-any-text-to-url-friendly-one, et al. — Gumbo, Nov 22 '10 at 11:14

Paul Dixon · Accepted Answer · 2010-11-22T11:12:00.580

19

You can use preg_replace to replace any sequence of whitespace chars with a dash...

 $string = preg_replace('/\s+/', '-', $string);

The outer slashes are delimiters for the pattern - they just mark where the pattern starts and ends
\s matches any whitespace character
+ causes the previous element to match 1 or more times. By default, this is 'greedy' so it will eat up as many consecutive matches as it can.
See the manual page on PCRE syntax for more details

edited Nov 22 '10 at 11:12

answered Nov 22 '10 at 11:06

Paul Dixon

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thank you for the response, i would appreciate if you could explain me what does the first parameter in the function actually does. – Ibrahim Azhar Armar Nov 22 '10 at 11:08
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thank you Paul, i got it. i must be studing more about regular expression. – Ibrahim Azhar Armar Nov 22 '10 at 11:17
Great answer Paul. Can I ask, how do you match 2 or more spaces? – Tony Knibb Aug 16 '14 at 14:19
`/\s{2,}/` would match 2 or more spaces – Paul Dixon Aug 17 '14 at 20:34

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 22 '10 at 11:08

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echo preg_replace('~(\s+)~', '-', $yourString);

answered Nov 22 '10 at 11:08

powtac

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 22 '10 at 11:20

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What you want is "slugify" a string. Try a search on SO or google on "php slugify" or "php slug".

answered Nov 22 '10 at 11:20

Yeroon

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He's seeking an answer on stackoverflow. Google is not an answer. -1 – Alireza Jul 14 '14 at 10:07

How to replace one or more consecutive spaces with one single character?

3 Answers3